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9 January 2013

Another beauty from days of yore; this Ford Transit was built by van builder extraordinaire Steve Stringer, who in the late 70's/early 80's had a company called Star Custom Vehicles. Stringer built such vans as the 'Star Wars' Ford Thames and 'Raspberry Sheikh' Transit - and the van you see below, KVX.

The scans contain the full story, but to sum up he built this van primarily to transport his and his son's Kawasaki bikes (the 'KVX' moniker is derived from the fact the bikes both had 'KX' in the name). Starting with a brand new van, he hand-crafted IMSA-style arches styled after the official Ford X-Pack items available for the MKII; the front spoiler was I believe part of a run made for him by Pete Unwin. The whole look of the van was very different for 1980; remember this was a time when portholes, sidepipes and murals ruled the day.

Where is it now? Your guess is as good as ours; Steve Stringer sold the company in 1980 and then went on to work for Porsche Design and then as a consultant for the likes of Foretravel and Featherlite motorhome companies in the States. After subsequently running other van conversion businesses there he currently runs Advanced Automotive Design based in Texas, a training resource for clay modellers in the design industry. The registration 'SRS 4 ' is on a Mercedes and as far as we can see, before today there were just two pictures of the van on the internet...
If anyone knows the whereabouts of KVX drop a line our way, a place is waiting for it in Amazo Towers subterranean car park, although we suspect (sob sob) it's long since been turned into bean cans...